


Flesh, Blood, and Bone

by TheRavenintheMoon



Series: Long Lost Souls [13]
Category: World of Warcraft
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-12
Updated: 2012-12-12
Packaged: 2017-11-20 22:34:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/590394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheRavenintheMoon/pseuds/TheRavenintheMoon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every death knight was once a hero. Every hero changes irrevocably the lives of those they love. And those one loves are never truly gone, even if they have gone so much farther than one would like to think.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Flesh

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I probably own nothing, except maybe my characters. I know that Blizzard, however, owns a small chunk of my soul... And yes, the title is a shameless rip-off of a chapter title from "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire." The similarity ends there.
> 
> Also, a fairly detailed description of parts of the Utgarde Pinnacle instance. This could be considered a spoiler.

_**Part 1: Flesh** _

**_Khereth and_ ** **_Kalyna_ **

            It had been a long, hard fight up from the base of Utgarde Keep to reach the last vrykul hold-outs and Scourge forces protecting King Ymiron himself at the Pinnacle. By this point, most of the vrykul who had been gathered in the entire Keep were dead or Scourge-beasts, though a few still clung to mortal life. Khereth knew they would not be mortal for much longer. They had chosen (or possibly been forced; he didn’t make a habit of conversing with the dead) to stand loyal to a king who had sold out his race for power and a seeming of immortality. And so the Alliance generals had decreed that the vrykul must die (die again, in most cases, these days) in a futile attempt to remove another of the Lich King’s weapons.

            Khereth glanced at Dindrane, wondering if the human ever thought about futility. The mage had thrown herself into the war against the Legion on Outland voluntarily, and Khereth had thought he would never see a more fruitless struggle. Then they had been called to Northrend—let those with less experience fight the remaining demons, and those who knew the relentless drive of a merciless enemy fight the Scourge that would otherwise be bolstered by the deaths of less experienced fighters. Dindrane, grumbling that she had seen all she wanted to see during a brief stint in the Plaguelands, and that she had no intention of bolstering the Scourge’s ranks with _her_ death, had taken the ship to the northern wastes reluctantly. Her sour mood had dampened many other adventurers’ spirits on the trip. Khereth had not understood her at the time, given her willingness to spend years mindlessly slaughtering demons on some world far from her own. After a few weeks—the first spent on the mind-numbing task of controlling the constant flow of Scourge that threatened the Valiance Keep supply lines, the rest as part of a task force sent to learn what they could of the vrykul king and his pact with Arthas—Khereth thought he understood.

            Though he had known, in a general way, that every body that fell in this war was likely to be raised to fight against those they had lately stood with, and though he knew that all bodies, defender and Scourge alike, were burned when possible to mitigate the numbers that could be raised, it was one thing to hear these things spoken of, and another entirely to kill a friend who had ridden out on some errand yesterday, and now returned as the enemy. It was one thing to hear of constant cremation, and another to live in the shadows of the columns of smoke, to smell the burning flesh and bone when the wind shifted around to blow from the wrong direction. Khereth’s brother, a Vindicator of some standing, had fought in one of the older wars in what were now the Plaguelands, at enormous personal cost. Now Khereth knew what he had never truly understood in Maryk’s few stories—the fear of losing a loved one not once, but twice, or thrice, or even at one’s own hand.

            The shaman tried to remember that Dindrane was far more powerful than he, and that she had no more intention of dying here in these frozen wastes than he did. He tried to forget that Kalyna had been a healer, strong enough to save so many lives, Maryk’s included, that she had had no intention of dying in the Plaguelands either, and yet she lay in the grave his brother visited twice a year.

            Khereth shivered as Dindrane placed a thickly gloved hand on his shoulder, recalling him to the present. They were not the first to have made the trek to the Pinnacle. Others had been sent to fill out the team meant to take Ymiron down. Archaeologists might worry about links in the chain and what place the vrykul occupied in the history of Azeroth. From a military standpoint, the Scourge-allied vrykul needed to be effectively destroyed. Cutting off their head seemed like a good way to start. Word had gone out from Valgarde—as quickly as possible teams had been assembled to clear out the halls below. Dindrane and Khereth had helped, and due to their efficiency (Khereth hated how efficient they were as a killing team), had been sent higher up to the Pinnacle itself. Apparently some foolish treasure hunters had tried their luck before anyone else reached the golden horde, and had become skeletons for their pains. Khereth wondered if, as their flesh melted from their bones, they had thought the treasure was worth the risk.

            Dindrane nodded to the two others who stood grouped around the image of a high-ranking Argent Crusade officer, no doubt receiving further orders. Clearly word of this operation had spread beyond merely Valgarde’s authority. The two others were obviously there, like Dindrane, to provide raw firepower. One was a dwarven monk, a cheerful, red-bearded fellow the two had met before. He raised a hand in greeting, his grim expression lightening.

            “I always feel better when I know there’s a quality healer at me back, an’ a sound ally at me side,” he said, most traces of his Ironforge accent smoothed away by long years spent under the tutelage of the great enchanters of Stormwind. His eyes shifted, briefly indicating the gnome warlock who still spoke to the Argent Crusade officer. “Him I know of old, an’ I trust him no’ nearly so far’s I could throw him. An’ tha’s not as far as ye’d think, lass,” he said as Dindrane raised an eyebrow. “He puts up a heavy fight.”

            Dindrane smiled. “Always a pleasure, Belgrim. Do we know who’s supplying the muscle for this little adventure?”

            Khereth turned to her ready with an incredulous retort—this was no ‘little adventure’—when he noticed the dwarf’s sudden frown. “Aye, lass.” Belgrim nodded over his shoulder, obviously uncomfortable. Dindrane and Khereth turned as one to look.

            A draenei stood in the open hall beyond, standing perfectly still and balanced as she surveyed, not the cursed golden horde, but the clump of Scourge that barred the way forward. Her skin, what little that could be seen under thick plate armor, was grey-tinged in death, though in life it probably had nearly matched the deep plum of their friend Periell’s skin. The bits of hair that peeked out from under this draenei’s helmet were blue, brittle, and tinged with the moss-green of decay that her dark resurrection seemed to have halted. If this were not enough to mark her as a death knight, the great, shimmering rune-sword at her back, and the cold, unearthly glow of her eyes—so much harsher than any living draenei’s—when she turned, certainly marked her as such.

            Khereth froze. Even framed in a close-fitting helm, there was something about that face…

            In the coldly doubled voice of her kind, the death knight said, “The dwarf does not trust me.”

            Khereth blinked. Under, or maybe through, the echo, he thought he recognized the voice, but the memory was faded with time and…grief, though he couldn’t think who…

            Belgrim swallowed. “I do not doubt ye’re _intentions_ ,” he said gruffly. “I jus’ worry ye might be pulled back under his will, this close to his throne.”

            “Impossible.” The death knight’s expression was impassive; a statue revealed more emotion. “Once beyond his power, nothing can be forced back under his will.”

            Khereth wondered if this statement was true, or if it was just a hope for the outcome of a continued struggle to remain free. Memory surfaced: his brother stood, head bowed, hand gripping a dark gravestone. _Hope is a myth, brother, for all its light gives us comfort. Truth is a light also, the cold light of stars that never wavers, never warms. Hope, in contrast, is merely a hearth fire. When you need it most, it will burn to ash in your heart._ Maryk’s voice, normally strong, deep, was cracked with pain in the memory. He never spoke like that, except when he remembered—

            “Kalyna?” Khereth asked suddenly in a strangled whisper. As the other four turned to look at him, he realized he had interrupted something, but had no idea what they had been talking about. The death knight blinked slowly.

            “That was once my name, yes,” she said evenly into the thick silence.

            Khereth, mouth suddenly dry, tried to swallow. The image of the dark headstone was fresh in his mind’s eye. “But,” he said, words suddenly unsticking from his throat to fall out in a rush, “After the war. You were dead and buried. I’ve been to the graveyard…”

            “Graveyard?” The word echoed calmly, a verbal cave that swallowed his wave of words. “No, my body was never recovered after the retreat…never buried, never burnt. Before the Lich King lost his hold over most of the land of Lordaeron, his agents went through old battlefields recovering the dead…I was one such unfortunate.”

            “But…” Khereth began again, shaking his head as he tried to reconcile this knowledge with everything his brother had said—and had not said. About to ask, the death knight (he could not bring himself to think of her as ‘Kalyna’) raised a hand to stop him.

            “No.” The syllable ground out, a hollow, leaden finality to it that shocked the shaman into silence. “My memory is not what it was,” she continued, in a softer voice, as if she spoke to herself and not to the others present. “I do not wish to encourage it.”

            Cold eyes pinned each of the team members in turn for just a moment, asserting her right to lead. “I am here for one purpose only: to destroy the agents of the monster who calls himself the god of death. This vrykul king has sold his people, willing and unwilling alike, for a throne that he will never be allowed to claim. He is, even in undeath, weak in his dependence on the Lich King’s will. He wishes to gain strength? Let us show him how weak he is—this would-be king of a dead empire and any who stand between him and the true death we will bring him.”

            The other four nodded assent, shifting to stand behind the death knight in a loose diamond—the monk in front, the casters behind, and Khereth left at the rear where he would, hopefully, never become a target. Dindrane sent one concerned look his way, but the death knight had already plunged forward, huge blade raised in a seemingly effortless chop at an abomination’s unguarded belly. She grinned as guts, barely contained, spilled across the floor, tripping the monster as its legs tangled in its own entrails. And so began the day’s grim work.

            Khereth fought to concentrate on healing, eyes shifting between each of the team members, watching to see who had been hit hardest, hoping the others would have sense enough to stand back so that they wouldn’t be hurt. Normally he wouldn’t have minded, he was good at his job, but it was a chore, keeping the death knight’s health up. And every time he stopped to think why, his eyes were inextricably drawn to that rictus of a face, blade recklessly tearing the Scourge to useless shreds, decapitating those she could in lieu of torching the remains. The whole Keep would be burned to the ground later, but the death knight clearly didn’t want any of those they killed rising to come at the group from behind. It was practical, of course, but watching her made the shaman feel sick. Sicker than usual, anyway, for one of these long, sanctioned, killing sprees.

            The death knight set a brutal pace, drawing what should have been far too many enemies at any given time, and yet she somehow managed to stop just short of taking more damage than Khereth could heal. He felt frantic, worried, always certain that around the next corner something they couldn’t handle would crawl out of the woodwork and reduce this arrogant death knight and any who followed her to just a few blood stains on the bone-littered floor.

            During one brief moment of respite, as the warlock checked Skadi the Ruthless’s corpse for anything of value, the death knight, impatient, scouted ahead down the next hall. Belgrim was chewing rapidly on a bit of old sandwich he’d had in his pack. Khereth took a deep breath, and mopped his sweating face with a bit of cloth as Dindrane stood, wrapped in the blue light of a spell that he knew would restore her mana and probably make her feel a bit less exhausted. Feeling slightly less damp, though no less frozen in the cold air of the terrace, he gulped some water. The death knight was still out of sight, when Belgrim stood up and climbed into one of the harpoon-slingers, trying to gauge how far up the tower they had come. Dindrane, finished with her spell, glanced around to see if the death knight had returned. Seeing that they were still alone, she pulled Khereth a few steps back down the terrace, gripping his hand tightly in her own. Though neither he nor Maryk had ever mentioned Kalyna to Dindrane, the mage knew that something was deeply troubling her lover.

            “What’s wrong?” she asked softly, keeping her voice barely louder than the whistling wind.

            _Everything_ , Khereth thought. _Those who are dead and gone, those you are_ told _have been laid to rest and are at peace shouldn’t be walking around, too fast, too strong, reveling in slaughter._

            All that he managed to say, weakly, was, “But Kalyna was an Anchorite…”

            Before he could elaborate, the death knight returned. “There are necromancers down the stairs. We need to hurry before they awaken a vengeful army at our backs.” Though her words spoke of wisdom and caution, her face and tone were filled with impatience and eagerness.

            Khereth swallowed, thinking of the mutilated corpses they’d left behind. It was highly unlikely even a small geist could be found to rise to block the team’s retreat, but he didn’t say anything. For all he knew, she was one of those who believed that necromancers could spell disparate bones back into the shape of the skeleton they no longer formed, even from a distance. Khereth shook his head. What did he know of necromancy? Perhaps they could.

            Long minutes passed as they wound down the stairs, and back up a long hall in a mad scramble to get to the throne room, the death knight in the lead driving more and more recklessly towards Ymiron. The pace began to tell on the living team members, but none dared to distract the death knight, not when she could just as easily turn that heavy blade back on them with no notion of her mistake until she came out of her blood rage.

            Finally, she paused at the doors of Ymiron’s throne room. The others, panting with exertion, gulped whatever sustenance they had brought along, and tried to catch their breath. The death knight quietly paced in impatience, not even noticing her companions’ discomfort. It was Dindrane, sensing that the others were breathing normally, who murmured, “Lead on.”

            There was a brief, bloody struggle with the last of Ymiron’s guards, followed by an only slightly longer struggle with the vrykul king himself. Khereth was amazed at how quickly they were able to defeat the undead tyrant. It felt like an anti-climax, after the long, arduous day of slaughter.

            When the great body fell, silent and unmoving, the death knight made a face, and spat (some fluid that passed for saliva, in a body that no longer produced any natural fluids) on the corpse. “You pledged allegiance to the self-styled _god_ of the shambling, wretched dead. What made you think the great gifts of your ancestors would make you more powerful than the pathetic ‘strength’ Arthas had already given you? They were just as dead as you, and probably much happier in their slumber.”

            Clearly unimpressed, she turned away, shifting her sword to her off-hand so that she could examine a tear in the exposed skin of her right arm. Khereth, glancing at the wound, wondering how he had missed it, could see through torn muscle to the bone beneath. Swallowing heavily against the wave of nausea, his healer’s instincts kicked in. He approached the death knight warily, surprised at her merely curious inspection of so gruesome a wound.

            “Doesn’t that hurt?” he asked. She glanced up at the sound of his quiet, deep voice, her cold, impassive gaze catching him again.

            “Hurt?” she asked. For a moment, Khereth cringed at the hint of anger in that iron voice. “I am always in pain,” she continued hollowly. “There is a hunger, a void in my very essence that can never be filled. What do you know of pain?” She contemptuously gestured back at the fallen king’s body. “No more than any living. No more than he did, before he became so enthralled as to choose this agony.” She lifted her wounded arm to finally sling the rune-sword she carried into its place at her back, proving that her arm retained its full range of motion and functionality even as injured as it was. Khereth’s stomach tried to rebel as she turned back to him.

            “ _This_ ,” she held up her arm again in emphasis. “This is nothing more than proof that flesh is weak.” Her glowing gaze froze Khereth where he stood. He could see nothing but those eyes; he did not notice that the other members of the team had stopped what they were doing to listen.

            “In the end,” the death knight continued, as if he had asked for an explanation, “we are all merely flesh. We can only hope to be slightly less weak than those we face, until, inevitably, we must succumb to something less weak than we are, or merely to the weakness inherent in these shells. They say the dwarves were once stone,” she added, glancing at Belgrim, frozen under the spell of her words, “but that those living these days are glad to be soft. The ancients, however—” She paused, turning away to begin the long trek back down the Pinnacle, freeing the others to do the same. Her voice came back to them as they hurried to catch up with her long strides.

            “The ancients had it right, when they called it the curse of flesh!”

            No one spoke as they passed through the halls empty but for the dead, and the smell of blood and decay, overpowering even in the still, frozen air of a Northrend evening. The warlock left without any pretense of a farewell as soon as the gates were in sight; Belgrim tipped a quick salute to Khereth and Dindrane before he, too, vanished into the darkening night. Khereth, however, turned back to the death knight, both wanting and dreading to ask what had happened to bring her to this state. Dindrane, however, could still feel the chill disapproval radiating off the death knight, and merely bowed in mild respect, before reaching up to grip Khereth’s shoulder. Without any subtlety whatsoever, the mage steered her lover towards the gates, leaving the death knight to report to those who waited here instead of back in the safety of Valgarde.

            Khereth allowed Dindrane to direct him, guilty, yet glad, that he had not had a chance to ask his questions. He was certain he wouldn’t like the answers. Just as he began to wonder what he could possibly tell Maryk about all this, that dead voice rang out behind him, clear and cold, one last time.

            “And shaman, whatever you do, tell my former husband your brother _nothing_.”

∞


	2. Blood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Heroes die, even if sometimes their legend lives on. Death knights are the only ones who both die, and live on under their own terms. In a manner of speaking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This battle is modeled more or less on the Battle of Darrowshire in the Eastern Plaguelands quest line. It's not meant to be the same; the key characters from the real battle are missing. And geographically, this town is a bit further east. Don't ask which war, I'm a bit fuzzy on the lore here. But it was certainly fun to write.

_**Part 2: Blood** _

_**Maryk and Kalyna** _

            Maryk had expected the graveyard to be empty. It usually was, this out of the way plot at a crossroads on Azuremyst Isle. The bustle of Azure Watch filtered down to the hollow, but only the occasional Peacekeeper on foot patrol between the Watch and the _Exodar_ passed close enough to witness the Vindicator’s grief. He came to mourn an old loss, the burden of which he knew he could never set down.

            Sniffing, wiping at the tearstains on his face, he carefully knelt to place a damp hand on the marker that bore his wife’s name. Marker. The thought was uncomfortable, like an old wound rubbed raw. Maryk’s brother, sometimes estranged, sometimes close, had asked what had happened, only the once, as if he were afraid to know what had caused the shadow in the bright brother he had always admired, whatever their feelings for each other at any given time. Maryk had said that the Anchorite he had loved for so long all those years ago lay buried here on this quiet isle where they had hoped to make a home. He had lied.

            Not for the first time, Maryk wondered if the clean-up crews—those poor unfortunates who had entered what was left of Lordaeron, now the Plaguelands, to burn anything (grain, bodies, the detritus left behind by the war) that might still carry the Plague—had found her body. She would have burned. It wasn’t a proper burial befitting a healer of her status, but at least she would be at peace. There was no way to know for certain. In the wake of the Scourge’s desolation, no one had time to identify every decaying body left behind. They were all equal in death—another bag of bones.

            Choking back a sob, Maryk sought to remember his wife as she had been in life: tall, stately yet vivacious, with long upright horns that poked through the hood she sometimes wore against the cold, her hair wrapped in an elegant roll that fell in a short horse-tail down her neck, her eyes glowing warm with suppressed laughter, her fingers, deep plum against his light violet, strongly gripping his own.

            He glanced at his hand; caught in the full force of the memory, he half-expected her to be there, fingers twined with his, smiling face tilted up for a kiss. He closed his eyes, ignoring the fresh tears that fell, imagining, instead, her cool lips pressed against his cheek—

            He flinched, jolting out of the memory as behind him a timberstrider screamed a challenge at a growling nightstalker that had wandered too far from its usual hunting grounds. Half turning, scrubbing his arm roughly across his streaming eyes, he thought he saw a flicker of movement hidden almost entirely by one of the big-boled pines. For one moment, recognition seared through him, hot and painful, as a gloved hand, a wisp of blue-ish hair faded further off the road into the trees. He very nearly cried out her name, but the word died on his lips as he took a step forward. Surely it had been merely a phantasm of his grieving mind. A closer look revealed nothing but trees as, in the distance, the timberstrider clubbed the weak and mangy cat to death, screaming its victory to any other that might seek to challenge it.

            Shuddering, hauling in a great, painful gasp of air, Maryk slowly pulled himself together, banishing the old memories to the room in his mind where he kept them locked up for the better part of every year. Only here, in this graveyard, did he acknowledge that he didn’t, even after all these years, have the courage or the heart to heal. As he began the slow walk back to the _Exodar_ , Maryk resettled his sword at his hip, his shield across his shoulders, his helm on his head. He could just as easily have ridden the distance in a fraction of the time it took to walk, but he wanted time to clear his mind.

            Late that night, back in his tiny room in Telaar, even the knowledge of an early guard shift the next day could not help him sleep. That flash of a watcher (mere phantasm, it had to be) in the trees plagued him, stirring up the memories he had so carefully locked away. And when he finally did sleep, just as the night was darkest, nightmares took him deep within the grief he constantly sought to escape.

∞

            It had been a long siege. All sieges were, in this type of war, when neither side was capable of surrender. Though many on the side of the Light might try to give up out of a sense of sheer hopelessness, there were too many who would not give in, and the fight went on. Maryk, bone-weary after a long, numbing shift beating back the undead that sniffed, jackal-like, at the borders of the town, trudged back towards the village square, his heavy plate armor weighing him down. He would have liked to wash away the scents of rotting flesh and bone dust, but pure water was a commodity the people of beleaguered Lordaeron could not afford to waste. Not for themselves, and certainly not for volunteer caravan guards who had managed to get supplies in, but had been incapable of getting themselves, or anyone else, out.

            Maryk stopped for a few minutes at the mess tents that had been set up on the one occasion supplies and reinforcements had managed to break through the siege. He knew he had to eat, but was almost too tired to perform even this simple, necessary task. He managed a few mouthfuls; everything was dry and tasted of dust. Unable to stomach any more, he forced himself to his feet, and made his carefully steady way (it would not do for the villagers to see defenders flagging) back to the room he shared with his wife.

            Kalyna was an Anchorite to Maryk’s Vindicator, as strong a healer as he was a protector. They had earned their status among the draenei through the long, weary years of their people’s struggle; they were not old yet, not by draenei standards, but they were by no means young. Long ago, they had found that they made a fine team. They had made their vows, and planned their future, a hazy thing they were never entirely sure of in an ever-changing, darkening world. But where one of them went, the other followed. They had agreed, on reaching this world, that whatever future Azeroth might provide for them would have to wait. The war that their newfound allies were fighting a continent away was one they knew all too well: it was the sort of war that would grow to engulf the whole world if it was not stopped. So here they were—fighting for one of the last few villages of a once-green land that withered even as they watched, full of suspicious, frightened humans and the scent of decay.

            Kalyna was already in their room, sitting on the bed, her face tinged grey-ish with exhaustion. She was dry scrubbing at the stains on her arms with a bit of cloth. She barely looked up when Maryk set his hammer down with a thunk on the rough wooden floor, and began to unbuckle his breastplate.

            “You tapped yourself dry,” Maryk said quietly, noting her trembling hands.

            “I couldn’t stop.” Her voice sounded—old and grey, he thought, like the rest of her. He wondered if he appeared the same way to Kalyna.

            Frowning at her tense back, he said softly, “You’ll kill yourself if you keep up this pace.”

            She shook her proud horned head. “I know my limits.”

            “And you constantly overreach them!” he snapped, breaking at her calm presumption.

            She suddenly crumpled under the weight of his outburst, dropping her arms to her lap, twisting the cloth she’d been scrubbing over her arms before stretching it to examine the stains on it in the light of their one smoking torch.

            Maryk sat heavily on the floor; free of his armor, he began to brush away the dust and detritus that clung to it with a large rag he’d pulled from an inside pocket. It wasn’t the cleanest, he’d been using it during the day to wipe the sweat from his face, but it was the best he had at the moment. At least, the closest to hand. Sneezing as a particularly violent swish of the cloth kicked up a swirl of bone dust, he sighed. “Light, but I am sick of the smell of this place.”

            “ _You_ are,” Kalyna nearly shrieked, her stupor falling away as she spun, still seated, to face him. “ _You_ stand at your post and breathe moving air. You bash in a few skulls, and while you are waiting for the next, the wind takes the scent of killing away. I—” she swallowed “—I spend my days in a sealed tent, trying to keep broken, bleeding men from dying of their wounds, so that they can go back out to be wounded again. I take care of the sick as well, you know we cannot be infected with this plague as they can, and I get to watch them cough up blood, and pray to get better—that somehow they have some other illness, one that will go away. And I get to kill them as it becomes apparent that they will not get better, kill them so that the undeath does not take them.” She took a deep breath, her sudden boiling anger quieting to a simmer. “I only wished I burned them as well. Maybe it would burn the scent of their blood from my nostrils.”

            And she threw the cloth at him. It was covered in the brown stains left by the strange, red human blood. Any healer, Maryk knew, hated to lose a patient. On this scale…day in, day out… This time he was the one who crumpled under the weight of her anger. Quietly, musingly, he said, as if it had just occurred to him, “The undead shed no blood.”

            Kalyna smiled grimly. It did not reach her eyes. “Of course not,” she murmured. “They left it all on some healer’s table the day they died.”

            Neither of them spoke for the rest of the night.

            Maryk awoke the next day with a deep feeling of unease unsettling his gut. Kalyna seemed to share his worry, and it made her very quiet. He’d never seen her like this—merely a ghost of her former self. Even on Outland, when all had seemed lost, she had found something comforting to say. She was fond of speeches; in calmer times she studied and memorized the great rallying cries of the good leaders of old. Maryk had never been interested; he had spent his quiet time with gears and metals and hides, making toys for others’ children and dreaming of the day when he could make them for his own. He had watched, fondly, but not truly understanding, Kalyna’s drive to absorb the stories of impossible victories at overwhelming odds, to feed her belief in heroes.

            That all seemed so long ago. He shook himself back to the war, long enough to force himself to eat what passed for breakfast. Then he shrugged away his worry, settled his helm on his head, and headed for his post. Something made him pause, turn, and catch Kalyna on her way to the healers’ tents. She did not protest at the unusual public display of affection. Rather, she seemed to cling to him (Kalyna never clung), searching for the calm reassurance and strength she normally gave to him. Maryk, the memory of her kiss still on his lips as he took up his easy, watchful stance at the gap in the boulders west of town, couldn’t shake the feeling that that kiss had been ‘goodbye.’

            The stale air was silent, too silent, as the morning wore on. No sentries whistled warnings, no metal clashed as some probing Scourge front-runner sought a break in the line and died again, no cries rang out from the sick and wounded back in the healers’ tents. The sun was high, hot, but there was no glint of light off the enemy’s armor—

            There. One glint, on a long, rotting pike. Another, off a rusty sword, a crushed helm, a…

            Maryk swallowed. This was no scouting force. This was an army, a great shambling wave that would, inexorably, crash over the town and drown all who were left. Sentries whistled from all sides now, slow to come, their mouths parched from long silence. Maryk shook himself free of his frozen stupor. They were surrounded.

            The Scourge hit heaviest from the east, cutting off any chance of getting a messenger to the nearest tower for aid. The open space to the north crawled with ghouls and geists, commanded by sorcerers. It looked just as hopeless to the west despite the natural fence of boulders; skeletons aided each other so that they could clatter up and over the boulders they could not find a way around.

            The morning blurred into the afternoon as the Scourge forced the town’s defenders back and further back until they were fighting in the square, in the inn, in the tents. Any villager well enough to do so wielded what weapons came to hand. As they fell back beyond the square, beginning to climb towards the foot of the mountains that fell nearly sheer at the town’s back, the sick and wounded, as much as it pained everyone, were left for dead. Those who couldn’t leave their loved ones were killed defending those who died only a little sooner than they would otherwise have done. The rest pressed grimly upwards.

            _War_ , Maryk remembered thinking, the only thought since the Scourge had broken the edge of the town that morning, _war is nothing but sacrifice._ Some elder in Outland must have said it once, for the memory to ring in such a deep, sad voice, and certainly, his people knew this better than most. But it still hurt.

            Slowly but surely, just as Maryk had predicted, the defenders were crushed. As the sun sank, the dying light brown and bloody, illuminating the piles of Scourge that lay inanimate, and the town’s dead, a lone death knight rode into the square. At his back rode two necromancers. There was a long pause as the Scourge froze, turning blind faces towards the death knight, waiting for a new command, and the defenders fought to catch their breath in the air suddenly thick with rising panic.

            One of the human paladins, the leader of the town’s defenses, sprang forward with a cry that shattered the still tension. The death knight parried a heavy blow meant for one of the necromancers, and the battle was reengaged. But the necromancers were protected by some dark magic, and while blows and what arrows the few defenders who could shoot had left rained around them, they began to raise the slaughtered legions to refill the ranks of the army the defenders had lost so much to thin. Those few defenders who were left backed even more determinedly towards a certain small cleft in the mountains at their backs. They attempted to form a circle, fighters to the outside, healers to the inside. But with every foot they gained toward their escape, they seemed to lose more people, whether they were cut down as they were overwhelmed or dropped from exhaustion. Some healers, tapping their life force to keep others alive, fell as well, and tripped up those defenders who could not spare a glance behind.

            The death knight was not so fixated on his duel with the paladin that he did not notice what the others were doing. A command from him sent some of the quicker ghouls around the large mob attacking the defenders to hug the foot of the mountains and fully surround the survivors.

            Maryk, shuffling sideways on the flank, could see the cleft out of the corner of his eye, and lifted his head to check that the great fall of boulders they had carefully netted to safeguard this retreat was still in place. No one wanted to try the mountain pass—no one had ever followed it further than a day or two out, and they had no way of knowing if it even went through to the Hinterlands, or if it would leave them stranded in some rocky, inhospitable gorge. But as a final retreat, one last effort to die without bolstering the Scourge forces with their fall…they had prepared for that.

            Several cries pulled his attention to those blocking the full crush of the Scourge as they backed away. Two defenders and one of the healers had fallen, most likely dead already, and the Scourge pressed forward into the gap. The circle broke in a panic, as any who could ran unheeding straight for the cleft. Maryk, a shocking rage taking him, blindly won through to Kalyna’s side. Their eyes met, briefly, and then she was at his back, a short thick mace in her hand. She had given up healing a long time ago, and was now simply fighting for their survival. In tandem, they swung back and forth, crushing their way through the hordes of the enemy together.

            They were the last to reach the cleft at the base of the hidden path. Turning, finally free of attack from behind, they joined those who still fought to keep the pass clear. Beyond the defense, the paladin and the death knight fought on. The ten or so defenders who had survived to the cleft were, in a madness of hope, holding it still for him. The great duel was nearly to the pass, all ten defenders hacking at wave after wave of Scourge. It was harder now, as the undead climbed the piles of just dead, and gained something closer to equal ground. Thankfully even the Scourge halted at the terrible cry behind them: the paladin sank to his knees, staring at his shield, still settled firmly over his arm, both of which were lying on the ground a foot away. A second great swing of the death knight’s blade, charged with unholy energy, cleaved the paladin’s breastplate and stopped his heart. With a blood-curdling shout of triumph, the death knight cut a swathe through his own allies so that he could personally annihilate the last few defenders, standing still in shock.

            Only Kalyna broke free of the fear, shoved the others back with an uncontrolled blast of light, and began to climb up to the rope that would free the avalanche they had set to smash the forward press of the Scourge and halt the death knight’s advance. Maryk, numb but recovering, finished what Kalyna had begun, shepherding the others further back, around a bend in the path. Once they were safe, he turned, and broke free of those who would stop him from helping Kalyna.

            As he ran around the bend, however, the death knight flung out an arm with a ringing command, freezing the Scourge as well as his intended targets, the two draenei who still dared to defy him. Kalyna had made it to the tumble of rocks above; her mace was tangled in the rope that, once cut, would release the net that held the avalanche in place. Casually, lazily almost, the death knight reached out. A strand of ugly purple fire coiled up to drag Kalyna to the ground. She was frozen, helpless, a fly in a spider’s web. The death knight grinned, lifted one gauntleted hand, and swatted her as easily as one would the fly. Her neck snapped, the surprisingly loud crack echoing down the pass. Then, contemptuously, as if she were no more than a broken doll with which he had grown bored, he tossed her body back down toward the ravaged town.

            Maryk did not hear his own roar of grief, did not even realize he had broken free of the death knight’s spell until he had already lifted his hammer (it was a gift, Kalyna had given it to him, he suddenly remembered, with perfect clarity, Kalyna, who was not…who _could not be_ …), sighted on Kalyna’s forgotten mace, and thrown. The weight of his pain and rage and all-consuming grief at his impotence to save the one person he loved on this—or any—world lent that throw the strength to knock her mace down, dragging with it the rope, the net, and the avalanche. Maryk fell back, stumbling, just missing being crushed by a massive boulder.

            He took no comfort in the fact that the death knight, expecting Maryk’s attack to fly at him, had not moved out of the way quickly enough, and had been crushed beneath the falling rock.

∞

            A Wildhammer scout had found the small party somewhere in the mountains above Seradane, the old elven stronghold. The dwarves, in their gruff way, had rescued them, nursed them as best they could, put them on gryphons and sent them down to Ironforge, from where the humans made their way as refugees to the great camps in Elwynn or Westfall to the south. Maryk, too, had left the dwarven stronghold, craving open air. He returned to the _Exodar_ , and begged for a place among the Peacekeepers, walking the quiet, mindless rounds of guard duty in the soft sea breeze of Azuremyst Isle.

            In his mind, he held a burial for his wife. In reality, he simply dug until he felt he had gone far enough, and placed a casket of her belongings in what he knew should have been her grave. He thought he would feel better for the closure of dirt spilling over a coffin, for the simple act of placing flowers at her gravestone to commemorate her life.

            But nothing helped. A part of him knew it was a sham, merely guilt that he did not lie buried beneath that avalanche, that he had not been hero enough to save her. Even now, with the way to Outland open again, and a station at a guard post a world away from his grief, he still dreamed of their last conversation. Of blood stains on her robes, her arms, her fingers, her face…

            _The undead shed no blood…_ he’d said. Again, he dreamed the snap of her neck, too loud, the only sound left in the nightmare. Simple. Final. Clean. No blue blood to wash away the brown stains. What was it, the last thing she had ever said to him, in that old, grey voice thick with the dust of the dead?

            _Of course not. They left it all on some healer’s table the day they died._

∞


	3. Bone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> But nothing can change the fact that the dead were meant to stay dead...

_**Part 3: Bone** _

_**Kalyna** _

             _“Ah, silver circle, let me look,”_ Kalyna murmured. _“And my eyes shall seem an open book…”_ Long ago, she had spent many an hour working out the perfect way to phrase that particular sentiment. Once, she had believed that she could look into a mirror and see the depths of her own soul, could read herself as easily as she read others. Somehow, it had worked better in theory than in practice. Though she had turned many a pretty phrase on the subject, she had never really known herself back when she still looked in mirrors. She could say so now with the cold clarity of distance. Monsters, she supposed, were like that. They knew what they were, did what they were made to do with no remorse, because they could see themselves clearly. No emotion clouded the shards of the mirrors the world tried to hold up to them.

            Kalyna took a deep breath out of habit rather than any real need. Though inner turmoil disturbed physical comfort, she settled herself as she once would have done: legs dangling over the lip of the parapet, hands splayed behind her to take her weight as she leant back, head tipped to watch the ragged storm clouds scudding overhead. She looked perfectly relaxed, merely a draenei daydreaming while she enjoyed a cool breeze. There was no one to see her, however, and they wouldn’t have believed what they were seeing if they had.

            The shattered dome of Auchindoun rose behind her, an eerie silence inside the circle echoing the wind without. Beneath her hanging hooves, the grey dust of the bone waste stretched to the dark, warped green of the remains of Terrokar Forest. It would not rain here. The wastes were always bone-dry, dust shifting in the cold wind. It was a lonely, haunted place, full of danger. The atmosphere suited Kalyna. If she had had blood, it would have been boiling, belying the fever in her flesh. But she was cold and dead, and she wanted desperately to freeze that which could not be burning.

            Here, in the cold and the not-silence of the wind above the cursed halls of her ancestors’ ghosts, Kalyna wondered what had possessed her to go back to Azuremyst. She had not stepped hoof in Stormwind, or any city, since the former Alliance among the Knights of the Ebon Blade had been welcomed back. She had quickly left civilization behind, walking the wild wastes of the world: a monster herself, she knew where the worst kept their lairs and sought them out. Destroyed those who would pass their nightmares on to others.

            But now the memories of old were tumbling fast and thick in her mind, a hot, sharp pain that hurt much worse than the dull throb of the days-old rent in her arm.

            She remembered waking, as if from a long nightmare, to the voice of the Argent draenei captive warring with the whisper of the Lich King. Even after she had broken free of Arthas’s grasp, she had not known much more than her name. The memory quickest to return to her free mind was nothing more than a set of impressions: dead, glowing eyes, a hollow snap, and the echoes of a terrible scream reverberating from a long way away. She feared that snap, that scream, in a way she had never feared the eyes, and she left her past behind her. In this cold unlife, memories could not help her purpose. Memories could not salve the pain.

            Until the day she met that shaman, she had walked in the dark, with just scraps of memory for light. But that shaman, so much like—her mind shied away, here where there was no point in false courage—like his brother, had shaken all those memories out of the void inside her. She remembered, as one, then two and three, days passed, things she had forgotten. She remembered the pleasure of soft sunlight on skin, of kissing in shadows. She remembered the free air of peace, and the tension of war. She remembered the long siege, the hopeless retreat. She remembered the future, a hazy dream meshed with long talk and twined fingers, a picnic on the bluff, a soft wind ruffling their hair and the waves lapping below. She remembered love. She remembered him. His light violet skin, his dark hair hung in two heavy braids over his shoulder. No beard, she quite disliked them, but two long tendrils framing his chin. Short twin horns above his temples. Kind eyes. A fierce loyalty. A man who was born to protect, and yet knew that she could take care of herself.

            “Maryk.” She whispered his name now, where the cruel wind would blow away words spoken in her cold, dead voice, so that he could never hear them. She’d gone to see him, now that she remembered, drawn like a moth to the flame. She’d found him, still grieving the loss of her. Somehow, she had hoped and feared that he had moved on. She had hoped she would find him…happy. Instead, she had seen him broken, sobbing, his eyes closed and hand curled as though he held her still. Almost, she had reached out to comfort his burning sorrow. Had she met him anywhere but in a graveyard, she might have done. She could have pretended that she had merely been lost for all these years, searching for a way home. Stepping forward, a branch had cracked beneath her, nearly drowned by a timberstrider’s battle scream.

            That sound recalled her. An echoing snap, far louder than this, lay between them. She fled.

            Here in the cold, She could admit with the clarity of death that she was afraid of the fire (of him, of memory), as she was afraid to look in the mirror.  For now that her eyes had been opened, the veil of living removed, she had no soul to look for. It had been left behind in some better place when she had been dragged back to this shell. That was why the living could not hold the dead. In the end, the vivacious, loving heat of their life would burn away cold flesh, cold heart, cold mind. They would look for a soul in the ashes, and they would find none.

            Memories carried the fires of the living, but now that she had learned to remember, she could not learn how to forget. So she sat above the halls of ghosts, watching ashes dance on the wind, and she burned herself away until all that remained were her bones.


End file.
